From The Co-Founder of Business Intelligence Software Company SiSense

Elad Israeli

Elad Israeli is co-founder of business intelligence software company, SiSense. SiSense has developed Prism, a next-generation business intelligence platform based on its own, unique ElastiCube BI technology. Elad is responsible for driving the vision and strategy of SiSense’s unique BI products. Before co-founding SiSense, Elad served as a Product Manager at global IT services firm Ness Technologies (NASDAQ: NSTC). Previously, Elad was a Product Manager at Anysoft and, before that, he co-founded and led technology development at BiSense, a BI technology company.

This post was inspired by the latest announcement made by Tibco, that they
are providing SpotFire Silver - their cloud-BI offering - free for one year.
Every few months, another BI player announces such a hosted BI
service/product. This comes in addition to number of smaller companies that
focus on these types of hosted solutions such as Gooddata, Birst and
PivotLink.
To-date, no one has proved that hosted (cloud) BI is a sustainable business.
None of the startups doing this have skyrocketed (yet?), and more of the
larger players (Tibco included, in my opinion) are joining the effort on
marketing hype alone. I doubt if they really know how they're going to be
making money out of it.
All that being said, would I use a cloud/hosted BI service? In spite of its
promise in terms of cost of ownership and easy deployment, the answer to that
is an emphatic no. There are se... (more)

I've recently come across an interesting online discussion where several
posters discuss working with large amounts of data and its implications on
business intelligence implementations. I wouldn't have noticed it if one of
the posters had not referred to SiSense in one of the comments.
The main reason for the post was purely technological, putting on display the
internals of QlikView's in-memory database technology. This lasted for about
5 posts, after which it turned into a bashing match between QlikView
supporters and what you could call QlikView non-sympathizers in regards to ... (more)

So much has already been said about how much of a pain business intelligence
is. The complexity, the constant IT bottlenecks, the crazy cost of software,
hardware, consultants and whatnot. Gil Dibner of Gemini Venture Funds
(formerly of Genesis Partners) described it very eloquently and in great
detail in his blog post about the SiSense investment round.
Since business intelligence imposes so many challenges, every existing BI
vendor picks his favorite ones and positions itself as the best at addressing
it. Some focus on providing easy to use front end tools for the business
user... (more)

I recently read an article posted on the SQL Server team's blog (Technet)
written by Shimon Shlevich, a product manager at Panorama Software, focusing
on Microsoft's recently launched PowerPivot in-memory offering.
According to the author, Microsoft has two main goals with PowerPivot - to
"introduce a new in-memory engine for data processing" and to "promote the
self-service BI concept extending the usage of BI systems to a wider
audience".
There are of course other reasons which the author did not mention, such as
Microsoft trying to get a fighting chance against QlikView who hav... (more)

Business intelligence in the cloud is hot topic recently, as part of the hype
surrounding the cloud in general. I am not a big fan of cloud BI and I have
mentioned that several times. However the topic does merit discussion.
The advantages of the cloud over on-premises are pretty straight forward.
However, as far as business intelligence implementations are concerned, the
question to me was always whether the benefits outweigh the unique challenges
the cloud introduces. If all business data was in the cloud, there was a
definite case to make for implement business intelligence sof... (more)